"We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different."–Kurt Vonnegut

Here are a few mounted characters I painted recently, all plastic. It’s been slow going but I hope to get all the figures I have which are suitable for mounted PCs done next. Of course there are way too many knights, they’ll mostly wait.

Left to right, a cleric, “prince,” and barbarian.

The cleric is just a knight from the BattleMasters game, his lance swapped out for a flail. The shield is (obviously) my crude free-hand of a lion rampant. I need to look into transfers.

The “prince” is from a set of castle-building blocks I got for my birthday one year. He seemed way too big for use with minis when I got it, long before scale creep. Back in the 80s he would have been a hill giant or something, but now he’s pretty average. The details were pretty crude and I wasn’t sure if primer would adhere to the soft, glossy plastic, but a coat of gesso seems to have done the trick. He could be a bard, magic-user, or fancy thief. I have a handful of mounted demihumans, but first I’ll focus on the remaining humans that don’t look like fighters. more to come.

The barbarian is cobbled together from the body and legs of a Lionheart “mercenary,” arms and head from the spare parts that came with a box of GW chaos marauders, and a horse of unknown origins that I got in a bag of spare parts at a convention. The horse is extremely barrel-chested and I had to break the mercenary’s already very bowlegged pose to fit. I tried to give him some Appaloosa type markings (dark spots on the hindquarters that only really show when the horse’s fur is wet). I’m surprised I didn’t have any mounted barbarians in my collection, though I have a dozen Rohirrim that usually serve. The problem with them is that they’re all quite similar, since they were for the LOTR wargame.

Anyway back to the castle blocks. The set was called “Exin Castillos” and had instructions in a number of languages. The box was a hexagonal cylinder. It seemed very exotic at the time and I wish I’d managed to keep together some of the parts that came in it. A few bits survive in my terrain: the portcullis found its way onto a castle, and some low wall sections I glued together for wargames, and that’s pretty much it. The princess (who, if I thought of it at the time, would have made a good giantess) was dismembered to make a prow for a Man’o’War ship. I believe there was also a ghost in the set, and I remember seeing a guard with a halberd on the box art but there wasn’t one inside the box. A little googling turned up this excellent collector’s site (in Spanish).

Like this:

As promised here are my flagellants. The Warhammer version of these are loosely based on the real flagellants of history, who make an appearance in my book. The real flagellants were fanatics who thought the Black Death was punishment for the world’s sins, and that people needed to be baptized in their own blood to wash away these sins. If you happened to meet some on the road, they might try to force you to join them, or beat you to death trying. But at other times they simply demonstrated their rites and were applauded by locals. At times they also went on pogroms against Jews and massacred them. The temporal authorities were understandably annoyed with them disrupting trade and travel and bands of knights would sometimes go patrolling to find and kill bands of flagellants, but this was unusual. Eventually the Church condemned them as heretics and many were burned at the stake. In Warhammer, they appeared as special Empire troops that are fearless and subject to frenzy like Norse berserkers, fanatically seeking out the taint of Chaos.

The GW box only had 10 bodies, but lots of extra heads, arms, and accouterments. So naturally I wanted to create some extras.

First, here are the figures I assembled with the bodies in the box.

These guys are really extreme, compared to the original lead flagellants made for Warhammer back in the day. I couldn’t readily find any images, but they were just unkempt monks with flails, whips, and clubs. These newer versions use massive flail weapons (some of which I scaled back, like the second guy in the bottom row, whose weapon originally included a flail head in addition to the bell). I like their scourges, but the real standouts are the guys with flaming hair and the pilloried guy.

Anyway with the extra bits I modified a few Lionheart peasants:

And also a few Zvedza soldiers. The guy with the back banner in particular was modeled on Lancelot at the end of the movie Excalibur. The others are presumably also knights who have lost their minds.

Like this:

I spent a couple hours kitbashing some plastic figures yesterday. The original intent was to create some figures in the vein of the old Citadel “chaos thugs.” Thugs were the weakest kind of chaos warrior in Warhammer, so I can’t be too surprised they were dropped from the Warhammer line. However they had a lot of character and I always liked the mix of influences they showed — many had a lot of John Blanche’s surrealism and punk aesthetic, while others might have wandered of the set of the Road Warrior or a Mario Bava horror film. Some peak thugs here and here if you are unfamiliar. When I realized how many of the thugs I’d collected over the years seem to have disappeared, and how hard to find original castings seem to be, I thought I’d cobble together some using parts of other sets I was already interested in or already had. My main ingredients are the Games Workshop “chaos marauder” set from about 2008 and a set of “Frostgrave cultists” from North Star Military Figures, with some pieces supplied by the GW “Flagellants” set (which will get its own post), some Zvedza soldiers from their short-lived “Ring of Rule” line, a few figures from the Lionheart board game, and a handful of chaos thug archers from the Milton Bradley/GW Battlemasters game.

The main challenge has been that the marauders are much larger than the other figures, both in terms of scale (maybe 30 mm) and build (steroid freaks). There is also a dearth of bare heads, so not nearly as many as I’d like can have mohawks or other weird hair styles like the old thugs. Still, I’m happy with a lot of them so far. More than a few will remain cultists, though, since the hoods and masks look so good.

Skeletor here just has a head from the Cultists box and the rest from the Marauders.

Body and head from Cultist set; arms from Marauders, mohawk from Battlemasters.

The hourglass is from the Flagellants set and the cleaver blade is from the really old GW “Fantasy Regiments” set, indented for an orc.

Cultist head and body, flagellant arms, with modified weapon.

Cultist with scrolls from the Flagellant set

Another somewhat pinheaded thug with a cultist head.

Marauder head on a Battlemasters body. Though the Battlemasters archers are nice, their pose is really hard to convert, and the heads are so so I’m not getting a lot of use our of them. Also this is the first time I noticed they don’t have quivers.

Zvedza head on a cultist

Cultist head on a Lionheart peasant. Not really related to the chaos thugs and cultists but it seemed like a good fit.

Cultist with modified arm and book from Flagellant set

Another Battlemasters thug, this time with a skull from the Zvedza “Orks” set for a head.

Lionheart body with Marauder head and arms. This figure had already donated both his arms and his head to other projects so I was glad to have extra parts to “save” him!

Cultist with flagellant arms and flail

Cultist with torch from the flagellants set

These all need to have mold lines and joints cleaned up, of course. I’ll post more later. In the meantime here’s a metal figure I rehabilitated while waiting for glue to dry.

I got this poor balrog with no wings and his sword and sword hand missing for $1 out of a bin of broken or just old miniatures. The marauders had one sword-armed arm and the hand seemed like a good match so I used it to replace his hand. I have never had much luck scratch-building wings so I decided to stay a bit truer to Tolkien and leave them off (IIRC the book just refers to “wings of smoke” or something like that, not actual bat wings). I used some plumber’s putty I’ve been hanging onto for too long to extend the mane, which I will paint as fire. Maybe I’ll add more later. Though I’m open to ideas for how to add “wings” of black smoke.

So it turns out I have three copies of Grenadier’s larvae miniatures. My first came in a boxed set of dungeon monsters. (I painted the worm-ends green and the faces in regular flesh tones. I very scrupulously avoided reading the Monster Manual back then so I painted my monsters all the “wrong” colors.) The other two came later — one I think came from Scottsz and the other I picked up second hand at Spellbinder’s in Kent, during the brief period when they had a a really good downtown location and tons of space. Anyway I stripped them all and began repainting them, then kind of shelved things until Scottsz’s minis came last fall.

A couple of months ago I broke them out to represent some hallucinations in a one-shot playtest adventure, and I realized I still hadn’t painted them all. Anyway when I threw some grub-sized larvae into my regular game, I decided I needed to get the minis finished for use. I figure that any minis I’ve been “saving” had better get used because who knows if I’ll ever get to run another D&D campaign, right? So I thought about the logistics of using these minis where three larvae are all in one “space.” Suppose one is killed…do I place a little marker near it, or say” this one is just two larvae now” or what?

Obviously I needed more larvae.

I considered sawing apart one or both of the spares to get some “singles” but then it struck me that these would be really easy to make from scratch. So I rolled out a “worm” of Sculpy, with indentations to suggest segments, and I was going to sculpt some ugly little heads but then I remembered a large box of 28mm plastic minis from the “Lionheart” board game, and decided it would be much faster to use their heads. I ended up using just one of each of the troops in the Lionheart game (skipping the heavy infantry in full helms). So I just sculpted the worms and baked them, and then glued on the heads with Liquid Nails. (Liquid Nails is great stuff for conversions and scratch-building, because it dries hard but slightly flexible and can be sculpted a bit before it dries if you use fingers and tools that are wet. It dries faster than epoxies and less brittle than super glue, and less toxic than either. I’d still use epoxy to superglue for metal-to-metal joins, and when assembling models, though.) I maybe should have sacrificed more peasants to get bare-headed larvae but I really like the idea of having a mob of peasants. And in the end the helmeted larvae look pretty messed up too.

I especially like the idea of crowned king reduced to … this.

So anyway when I was looking them up again in the Monster Manual (after having painted them pale yellow/white like maggots) I was happy to see I got the color right and delighted to see that Gygax had established a whole economy of larvae. They can be made into imps and quasits by devils and demons, respectively, and there is a bustling trade in larvae. They are often harvested by night hags who use their supply to help keep their home plane of Hades under their control by selling or giving them to demons and devils. Larvae in the Monster Manual are the souls of the most evil humans, so night hags seek out evil people to slay and steal their souls.

In my setting I’m making the human soul a composite of two parts (the Gimlé soul and the Urth soul; they are normally bound together, and together they are both “immortal” like the gods themselves. In this state they can abide in Valhalla and other godly realms. But separated, the Urth soul grows into a larva and can be easily destroyed. The Gimlé soul, it is thought, could ultimately ascend to Gimlé (“High Heaven” in the Norse myth), but the soul is only supposed to be broken down into the two parts after Ragnarok. So what’s going on with the souls of those killed in Telengard? What happened to the Gimlé souls of the adventurers whose Urth souls were discovered on the stairs to level two?

Click to embiggen

BTW the title of this post refers to a morbid nursery rhyme sometimes called “The hearse song.” There’s some interesting stuff about it here andhere. I bet larvae get tired of singing that.

Granted, the Vikings are more popular, and the Normans were the final victors, but the English army of 1066 had heart. Harold and his men raced north to repel a massive Viking invasion, catching the enemy by surprise and massacring them. Then they raced south to Hastings, shedding most of their (horseless) light troops and levies along the way. There Normans won the day, but only after taking shocking casualties from the Huscarl’s axes. The dismounted huscarls of Harold’s army turned back repeated charges by the Norman knights, which is pretty incredible really. (more…)

Like this:

The Normans, as you may know, were descendants of Vikings (Northmen =>Norman) in France. They spoke French but were basically vikings on big ass horses (for the time) with state of the art arms and armor. One charming account of their diplomacy is mentioned by John Julius Norwich:

Calling a halt, [the Byzantine Catapan] sent a messenger across to them, offering the choice: either they could leave Byzantine territory peaceably and at once, or they must face his own army in battle on the morrow.

The Normans had heard communications of that sort before, and knew how to deal with them. During the harangue one of the twelve chiefs, Hugh Tuboeuf, had approached the messenger’s horse, and had been stroking it approvingly; now, as the man finished, he suddenly turned and struck it one mighty blow between the eyes with his bare fist, laying the luckless animal unconscious on the ground. At this, according to Malaterra, the messenger in a paroxysm of fear fainted dead away, but the Normans, having with some difficulty restored him to his senses, gave him a new horse, better than the first, on which they sent him back to the Catapan with the message that they were ready.
—–Source(more…)

Valhalla of the blogs

Copyright notice

All written content copyright Mike Monaco, 2008-2019, except where attribution to others is explicit or implied. Some images have been collected through Google Image Search and their use is not intended as a challenge to the copyright holder, and they are included for educational purposes only. I try to use public domain images, or my own photos or drawings whenever possible. If something that belongs to you appears here and you want it removed or better attribution provided, please let me know. If you want to use any of my intellectual property for your own project, let me know: mike period monaco atsymbol yahoo period com. I’ll probably just ask for attribution.